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Questioningly Results: Making Magic

October 1, 2012

Last week, J. K. Rowling’s novel “The Casual Vacancy” took the world by storm, or at least some kind of peculiar anti-storm: the book, which received mixed reviews, was her first foray into adult fiction, and as such earned as much notice for what it wasn’t as for what it was. What it wasn’t: a Harry Potter sequel or update or extrapolation, or anything else Pottery, for that matter. But that didn’t stop us from wondering about what kind of book an adult “Harry Potter” might be, and from asking you to wonder the same. So that was last week’s question: write a sentence from an adult Harry Potter novel.

Many of the responses were adult in the narrow sense: they found Harry waist-deep in sex, drugs, and other forms of debauchery. In some cases, this meant R-rated spells (@ForeverYoung362’s “‘ERECTO PATRONUM!’ Harry yelled with a lascivious force at the fast approaching, scantily clad dementors”); in others, it meant R-rated jokes (@davesgonechina’s “‘Stripper, hell. I’ve been in here three whole weeks looking for my broom,’ said Ron”). Others, like @hopedellon, simultaneously satirized Harry and “The Casual Vacancy” (“Like many child stars, Harry Potter struggled to adjust to adult life, turning to sex & drugs & sordid small-town elections…”).

Not everyone’s mind was in the gutter. There were readers who explored more mundane markers of innocence lost, like @danihartnyc (“Harry stared into the Mirror of Erised and smiled. His hair was finally back”) and @skgreen (“ ‘Oh Ron!’ said Hermione, sharply, ‘When will you learn you can’t simply copy off my taxes, you’ve got to do them yourself!?’ ”).

This week’s runner-up had a magical mix of pathos, realism, easy puns, and nephrology: it was @christamar10’s uncomfortably good “Harry bent over the toilet, his face contorted in pain; it seemed he would never pass the sorcerer’s kidney stone.” But there was one entry that stood out for the ambitious way in which it wrapped up and dispatched the entire Potter experience in an innovative, intriguing, semi-original manner (informed by St. Elsewhere and The Bob Newhart Show before it, perhaps): @BoGanz1’s “Harry, Dr Voldemort is a psychiatrist, not the ‘Dark Lord’ and this is a hospital, not a sorcery school. We’re here to help!”